Elite Game Developers Podcast

Today I'm talking with Shaun Rutland, the Co-Founder and CEO of Hutch, a racing games company from London, UK. Their titles include games like Rebel Racing, F1 Manager and Top Drives. When founding Hutch, Shaun and his co-founders wanted to create a special company that would give the power and creativity to their staff. Will now hear more from Shaun himself.

In June 2020, I did a webinar with Jussi Autio, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Resistance Games. Jussi approached us with the idea of providing his knowledge on projecting sales in PC games so that the fans of Elite Game Developers could benefit from Jussi’s extensive understanding. Jussi's template can be found at https://elitegamedevelopers.com/pcgame

Today I'm talking with Matt Frenchman, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sugar, a game financing company from London, UK. Matt was previously an investment banker, and in the recent years, he's been building Sugar, a user acquisition financing company for games. In this episode, we talk with Matt about how he's been learning how gaming works, and how he can change dept financing for games. I can tell you that the ROAS of this episode is off the charts! Check out Sugar at https://www.add-sugar.io/

In May 2020, I did a webinar with free-to-play consultant Nick Murray, where we talked about the ways that developers can create long-term engagement for their players, and to keep them playing the games from months and years to come. We specifically talk about what is long-term engagement, why it matters and how developers in hybrid casual can take learnings from midcore.

Today I'm talking with Celine Pasula, the CEO of Fingersoft, a gaming company best known for their Hill Climb Racing mobile games. Celine starts in gaming during the Java mobile game days. Then she went on to become a co-founder of Grand Cru, the mobile games company behind Supernauts. Now Celine has taken on a new role as a CEO and in this episode, we talk about her ways of learning to become a leader and waht has been challening in her work.

In May 2020, I did a webinar with the Aalto University on the topic of How To Minimize Risks In Games Business, especially when you are trying to get a startup off the ground. We have the accompanying slides on our website, which you can find by going to https://elitegamedevelopers.com/risks.

Today I'm talking with Richard Kim and Sam Englebardt, who are partners at Galaxy Interactive, a $325m fund shaping the future of interactive entertainment. Richard and Sam have been investing into gaming for a while now and in this episode, we discuss how they see financing in gaming evolving, what it takes to get into competitive rounds and how they see as key in the gaming space in the next 2-5 years.

My book, titled Long Term Game - How to Build a Video Games Company, came out in March 2020. We’ve just released the audiobook version and you can find that on Audible and other major online audiobook stores. I want to share with you the first chapter of the book. Hope you enjoy this read from Keith O’Brien. Get the book from here https://elitegamedevelopers.com/book-launch-why-i-wrote-the-long-term-game/

Kristian Segerstrale is the CEO Super Evil Megacorp, a games company based out of San Francisco. Kristian is a legend in gaming. He started his first games company Macrospace twenty years ago, which IPOed as Glu Mobile a few year later. Later he sold his second company Playfish to EA in 2009. We talk about being an entrepreneur in gaming, and how Kristian's beliefs have evolved over the years, in what it takes to succeed in gaming. Watch Kristian's talk from 2011 by going here https://elitegamedevelopers.com/egd-news-26/

In this episode, we’re going to listen to the recording from a webinar that we here at Elite Game Developers organized in May of 2020. The topics was "Work From Home For Game Teams”. We had Sophie Vo, the Game Lead from Voodoo, on the webinar and both me and Sophie did a presentation on the learnings of working from home, how remote first companies will be operating in the future and what working from home has been like for gaming startups.